On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 03:28 -0700, David Lang wrote:> On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:> > On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 21:12 -0700, David Lang wrote:> >> On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Wesley Craig wrote:> >>> On 17 Sep 2008, at 11:40, Jens Hoffrichter wrote:> >>>> Why does cyrus need it's own> >>>> structure for the mailboxes, which is similar, but not wholly> >>>> compatible, to maildir. Maildir and cyrus both suffer from the same> >>>> disadvantages (huge needs in terms of inodes etc.), yet I see no> >>>> distinctive advantage for the cyrus mailbox format to maildir.> >>> Performance. I could go on & on, but that's the answer, basically.> >> actually, I suspect that Cyrus existed before Maildir and since Cyrus is a> >> 'black box' server there's no advantage to moving to maildir.> >> Also Cyrus has cache, index, and flags stored seperatly from the message itself,> >> which means that when these things are changed the message file itself doesn't> >> need to change.> > Yep, which is why the sealed mailstore is a good idea: meta-data. You> > can keep reliable meta-data if third parties can go in and muck about.> one of those "can" should be "can't" :-) Yep, I mean nope, I mean... :) Should have been:<quote>Yep, which is why the sealed mailstore is a good idea: meta-data. Youcan't keep reliable meta-data if third parties can go in and muck about</quote> Anyway, this is the same reason one puts a web service in front of anRDBMS (rather than clients connecting directly to the DB). Three-tierarchitectures just facilitate greater consistency and security thantwo-tier systems [witness the constant security breaches in many LAMPapplications, not for the same technical reasons maybe, but at least onone level it is conceptually the same kind of problem]. After a decadeof sys-admin work I've become rather a bigot about this kind of thing. > >> doign a quick google check on maildir it also appears that maildir is not as> >> standard as people think it is, it's defined almost entirely by the> >> implementation (DJB started it, but never worked to turn it into a standard for> >> others to use) ----Cyrus Home Page: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/twikiList Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
